En Afrique, l’art ou, du moins, le travail de certains artistes, fonctionne souvent comme un outil de sensibilisation voire un dispositif de guérison. Il a pu être à cet effet instrumentalisé par des régimes politiques qui y ont vu un vecteur idéal pour propager leurs idées. Cependant, l’exercice du pouvoir politique ne peut plus se résumer à une simple concentration autocratique. Son hybridation et sa dissémination à travers différentes institutions locales comme internationales, notamment les ONG, se répercutent sur les dynamiques propres au champ artistique, tant dans le domaine des arts visuels que dans celui des arts de la scène. Toutes ces cultures expressives abordent des problématiques sociales bien ciblées en vue d’un changement ou d’un dépassement des traumatismes.

Argument

Art in Africa, or at least, the work of some artists is often used as a tool for awareness, even sometimes for healing means. However political regimes may exploit this work for spreading their ideas.

However, political power cannot come down to an autocratic concentration. Hybridation and dissemination of power throughout different local and international institutions, mostly NGO, affect the dynamics of the artistic field, in visual arts as well as in performing arts. All these expressive cultures deal with social issues and aimed to impulse a change or to overcome trauma.

The rhetoric of prescription towards development and peace is so dominant within the doxa that the artist’s ethos on the humanitarian market that is becoming ethical as well as aesthetic.

Should we understand this transdisciplinary artistic trend taking place in Africa as an update of the well-known paradigm of the committed artist, hence representing the entrance in a new historicity regime?

Does the transition from nationalist art, more or less submitted to the political power in place, to an art free from all governmental injunctions allow us to infer the rise of a more subversive, even anti-establishment expression?

Papers from various fields as well as pluridisciplinary papers relating to performing arts (music, dance, theatre) and visual arts (painting photography, cinema) will be considered. The papers can focus on all kinds of mediation : happening and performance, written text (book, newspapers, booklets) as well as radio and TV.